After multiple people were injured in a shooting incident at the State Fair of Texas last weekend, the contractor who provided the weapon detectors for the fair claimed that his system would have alerted security officials if someone had walked through the scanners with a weapon.
This year, for the first time, the State Fair is using manufacturer CEIA’s OpenGate towers to detect potential threats.
The system involves two scanners, each standing 6 feet tall, which are meant to detect weapons, “seeing” through clothing, purses, or bags.
“This is going to be where you won’t have to take your phone out of your pocket. You won’t have to put your bag down. This is going to read through all of that,” Karissa Condoianis, senior vice president for public relations at the fair, told Fox 4 News KDFW days before the fair opened. “This is the latest and greatest technology when it comes to detection. We’re looking for weapons, so this is going to be able to detect any of that as people walk through it.”
However, a shooting that occurred at the fair has called into question the reliability of the towers.
The incident occurred around 8 p.m. on Saturday, leaving three people injured, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
While fair rules allow those with a license to carry their weapon on the premises, the alleged shooter, identified as 22-year-old Cameron Turner, was unlicensed.
Condoianis said in a text message sent to The Dallas Morning News, “The investigation into how he got a weapon into the fairgrounds is ongoing.”
Genaro Cavazos, president of GXC, the protection services company that supplied the fair with the OpenGate towers, claimed that the system would detect the presence of a weapon every single time.
“And I would put my own name, my own reputation — certainly the manufacturer puts theirs on it — 100% of the time that weapon walks through that detector, it will alert,” he said, per the DMN.
Security personnel can change the tower’s sensitivity levels, something that researcher Nikita Ermolaev said could impact the system’s effectiveness.
“If you increase the sensitivity, you’ll decrease the possibility of missing a weapon,” he said, per WFAA. “However, the false alarms will increase significantly.”
Ermolaev added that while there is no indication that the OpenGate towers have missed a weapon in the past, it also cannot be guaranteed that the system is able to identify every possible weapon in existence.
“The term ‘Weapons Detectors’ implies this is a technology that is capable of detecting weapons,” Ermolaev said, per WFAA. “Through real-life experience, independent testing, and just the basic physics of these systems — it’s clear they won’t be able to detect all the weapons in the world.”